Supply Chain Technology Blog

Seeking to optimize its supply chain, Quality Bicycle Products opted for HighJump’s WMS technology — surpassing its goals and surprising even its leaders in the process.

Quality Bicycle Products has always placed a premium on efficiency. With over 5,000 customers around the world and a longstanding commitment to rapid fulfillment, the company must ensure that every bicycle part across its four distribution centers moves through the supply chain as quickly as possible.

QBP primarily works as a B2B vendor for mom-and-pop bicycle shops, handling eCommerce order fulfillment and shipping directly to customers on these small businesses’ behalves. In recent years, however, the company has begun to see a flood of bulk orders from around the country come through its distribution centers, slowing operations and overloading a supply chain built to accommodate smaller shipments. Fortunately, QBP was able to channel the agility of HighJump’s WMS software to navigate the challenges created by this rising tide.

Skipping the Line

With the size of orders quickly diversifying, QBP needed to maintain order on the warehouse floor and ensure that everything was shipped on schedule. “We decided we needed a better way to process the small orders, because they were frequently cluttering the warehouse space we needed to process larger orders,” says Senior Business Analyst Tamara DeGarmo.

The company hoped to streamline its in-house logistics processes for these small orders in a way that allowed warehouse workers to pick products into boxes, stage them directly to the label line, and get them shipped out as efficiently as possible. According to DeGarmo, “we wanted to reduce the number of orders we were sending to our packing area by 20%, with the underlying goal of decluttering our warehouse space.”

By making a few adjustments to the HighJump WMS system, QBP surpassed that benchmark within three months. The company set its sights even higher from that point forward: as DeGarmo recalls, “we wanted to build the orders into a box, with a license plate, and bypass the repackaging step altogether.”

Backed by the highly adaptable HighJump WMS platform, the company soon made its ambitious goals a reality. In a single year, QBP’s adjustments to its WMS allowed 247,000 products to skip the packing stage — resulting in a significant reduction of time, effort, and money expended.

Adaptability and Agility

QBP credits HighJump’s WMS technology as a major contributor to its success. According to Application Developer Ron Bruns, the company used the system’s Architect and Sequel features to restructure warehouse logistics — an adjustment which proved critical to QBP’s success.

“It was a huge productivity gain,” adds DeGarmo. “We reduced our labor hours dramatically. We were starting to notice close times that were an hour earlier on average every night.” This one hour reduction in work hours has added up to an astonishing 4,731 total labor hours cut in the year since these changes were implemented.

Thanks to the adaptability of HighJump’s WMS offerings, QBP is seeing better results than ever before — and trusts that the technology will continue to yield positive results for the business for many years to come. “We’re continuing to grow the small orders that we ship on behalf of our mom-and-pop bike stores, so anything we can do to grow that business and keep our operations efficient is critical,” says DeGarmo.